Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman reveals how a 2015 bus ride with Jack Ma led to his firm being the world’s largest data center owner “We did see the whole AI revolution, and that's just because of an accident. When I was in China in 2015, sitting on a bus with Jack Ma, who is the founder of Alibaba, and he started talking about that.” “I literally had no idea what he was talking about, and he explained that this would be the most consequential technological change which would change the world.” “So I have a bunch of academic relationships, one of whom was the head of MIT. He said, ‘Jack's underselling this’. So I said, ‘how do you know?’ He said, ‘because we invented AI at MIT.’” “And we positioned the firm at Blackstone in this unique way where we bought a very large data center, a company, in 2021 for $10 billion. It's now 15 times larger.” “We're the largest owner of data centers in the world. That puts us in touch with the six hyperscalers, because we work for all of them. So we know what's happening almost everywhere in this ecosystem.”